Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity

It is generally agreed upon that "linguistic creativity" is a unique
property of human language. Some claim that linguistic creativity is
expressed in our ability to combine known words in a new sentence,
others refer to our skill to express thoughts in figurative language,
and yet others talk about syntactic recursion and lexical creativity.

For the purpose of this workshop, we treat the term "linguistic
creativity" to mean "creative language usage at different levels", from
the lexicon to syntax to discourse and text (see also topics and references, below).

The recognition of instances of linguistic creativity and the
computation of their meaning constitute one of the most challenging
problems for a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks, such as
machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, question
answering, and sentiment analysis. Computational systems incorporating
models of linguistic creativity operate on different types of data
(including written text, audio/speech/sound, and video/images/gestures).
New approaches might combine information from different modalities.
Creativity-aware systems will improve the contribution Computational
Linguistics has to offer to many practical areas, including education,
entertainment, and engineering.

Within the scope of the workshop, the event is intended to be
interdisciplinary. Besides contributions from an NLP perspective, we also welcome the
participation of researchers who deal with linguistic creativity from different
perspectives, including psychology, neuroscience, or human-computer interaction.

Location

View of Boulder from Bear Peak. University of Colorado at the far left.

The CALC-09 workshop will be held in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2009 in Boulder, Colorado, on June 4, 2009.

Topics

We are particularly interested in work on the automatic detection, classification, understanding, or generation of:

Depending on the state of the art of approaches to the various phenomena and languages, preference will be given to work on deeper processing (e.g., understanding, goal-driven generation) rather than shallow approaches (e.g., binary classication, random generation). We also welcome descriptions and discussions of:

computational tools that support people in using language creatively (e.g. tools for computer-assisted creative writing, intelligent thesauri);

computational and/or cognitive models of linguistic creativity;

metrics and tools for evaluating the performance of creativity-aware systems;

Invited Speaker

Curveship: A System for Interactive Fiction and Interactive Narrating

Interactive fiction (often called "IF") is a venerable thread of creative
computing that includes Adventure, Zork, and the computer game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as innovative recent work. These
programs are usually known as "games," appropriately, but they can also be
rich forms of text-based computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples
of computational literary art. Theorists of narrative have long
distinguished between the level of underlying content or story (which can
usefully be seen as corresponding to the simulated world in interactive
fiction) and that of expression or discourse (corresponding to the textual
exchange between computer and user). While IF development systems have
offered a great deal of power and flexibility to author/programmers by
providing a computational model of the fictional world, previous systems
have not systematically distinguished between the telling and what is
told. Developers were not able to control the content and expression
levels independently so that they could, for instance, have a program
relate events out of chronological order or have it relate events from the
perspective of different characters. Curveship is an interactive fiction
system which draws on narrative theory and computational linguistics to
allow the transformation of the narrating in these ways. This talk will
briefly describe interactive fiction and narrative variation and will
detail how Curveship provides these new capabilities.

New: Schedule

We received many good submissions, and would like to thank all authors for their work. After a competitive reviewing phase, eight papers were finally accepted for full-length presentation at CALC-2009. An additional four of the peer-reviewed submissions will be presented as a poster, supported by a very brief oral presentation. The schedule is as follows:

16:50–17:15 "'Sorry' is the hardest word." Authors: Allan Ramsay and Debora Field

Summary and Discussion

The workshop will close at about 17:30.

Submissions

Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Papers are limited to 8 pages. The style files can be found here: [1]. No author information should be included in the papers, since reviewing will be blind. Papers not conforming to these requirements are subject to rejection without review. Papers should be submitted via START [2] in the .PDF format.

We encourage submissions from everyone. For those who are new to ACL conferences and workshops, or with special needs, we are planning to set up a lunch mentoring program. Let us know if you are interested.

Travel Grants

We are happy to announce that up to eight (8) travel grants can be awarded to CALC-09 participants, thanks to NSF award #IIS-0906244.

Candidates must apply by sending the workshop chairs a short motivation statement. The statement should be submitted electronically to the workshop organizers (Anna Feldman [feldmana at mail.montclair.edu] and Birte Loenneker-Rodman [birte.loenneker at uni-hamburg.de]), by April 12, 2009.

The following criteria will be considered when selecting the awardees:

paper accepted for presentation at the CALC-09 workshop (single author, first author, or co-author, preferably with other students only);

if not from the U.S., resident of a hard-currency problem country as defined by ACL (Mexico, Central or South America, Asia (excluding Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore), Africa, Central/Eastern Europe (countries east of Finland, Germany, Austria, or Italy and north of Greece and Turkey));

especially if from the U.S., minority background (e.g., based on gender, disabilities, race);

absence of other means of funding, as documented by the applicants;

status (full-time students have precedence over any other category).

If the number of eligible applicants exceeds the number of available travel funds, the decision will be based on a)
the quality of the paper as judged by the reviewers and by the workshop organizers, in conjunction with b) the submitted motivation statement.

Consequently, travel grants to participants in the CALC workshop who do not have a paper at CALC can be awarded only in very exceptional cases. Please contact the workshop organizers before applying.